New international crew delivered safely to ISS

The Russian-US-Italian crew ferried to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft has successfully entered the orbital outpost, where they were greeted by two Russian and one American colleagues.

“The hatches are open. The crew of the Soyuz got safely
aboard the ISS,” a spokesperson for Roscosmos told RIA
Novosti.

The spacecraft blasted
offfrom Baikonur
Cosmodromeat
21:01 GMT, with the crew reaching the ISS in just under six
hours.

After the docking and hatch opening the expedition 42 crew has
been welcomed aboard by Butch Wilmore, Aleksandr Samokutyaev and
Elena Serova, who also flew to the ISS in an automatic
short-trajectory regime back in September.

In March, the Expedition 39 crew was forced to take a longer
trajectory to the ISS instead of the planned six-hour one as a
precaution after the Soyuz spacecraft skipped a pre-programmed
steering maneuver.

Soyuz vehicles typically used to spend two days chasing the space
station in orbit after launch. A quicker arrival to the orbiting
complex cuts down the overall amount of consumables, as well as
minimizes the amount of time the astronauts spend inside the
small Soyuz.

“We're going to be primarily focused on maintaining the
station safely, keeping it running and leaving it a better place
than when we arrived,” Virts said before the launch.

“But of course, the mission of the space station is science,
and we have a very aggressive science program, roughly 170
US-based experiments, NASA and US companies and private
educational institutions, and over 70 other international
experiments. So there's a lot of science we'll be doing.”